I was, as a child, always intrigued by the end credits of the TV shows we watched that mentioned the providers of the stars’ outfits. For The Dick Van Dyke show, for example, it was always Mr. Van Dyke’s Wardrobe Furnished By Botany 500.

What was “Botany 500,” I wondered. And what did it mean that they “furnished” his wardrobe: were the clothes free, in return for the promotion in the credits? Did everything he wore come from Botany 500? Without Wikipedia, my childhood self was left to wonder.

But my adult me has ready access to the information:

Botany 500 has provided wardrobe for many game show hosts and television presenters, including Phil Donahue of The Phil Donahue Show.

In addition, the company provided the wardrobes for Danny Thomas on Make Room for Daddy, John Newland on Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond, Dick Van Dyke on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Don Adams on Get Smart, Mike Connors on Mannix, Telly Savalas on Kojak, Bob Newhart on The Bob Newhart Show, Dick Sargent on Bewitched, Brian Keith and Sebastian Cabot on Family Affair, Sherman Hemsley on The Jeffersons, Lyle Waggoner on Wonder Woman, Peter Graves on Mission: Impossible, Jack Klugman on Quincy, M.E., and Bill Macy and Conrad Bain on Maude.

Those are the men and their shows of my television youth, which explains why Botany 500, to this day, is imprinted on my branding brain.

My mind turns to such things because this week, for the first time in my life, I appeared was on TV in a more-than-just-CBC-dropping-by-unexpected kind of way, and I had to give thought to what I would wear.

Fortunately recent events conspired to prepare me.

Earlier this year when Prince Edward visited Government House to present the Duke of Edinburgh Awards, I was invited to represent Home & School. But dress was formal, said the invite, and all I had in my closet was the ill-fitting suit I kept around for wakes and funerals (purchased at Henderson & Cudmore when I was 30 pounds heavier).

On short notice, Dow’s Men Wear came to my aid, outfitting me with a sharp Calvin Klein good-for-almost-anything jacket that served me in good stead.

This summer when I was in Sweden for Olle and Luisa’s 10th wedding anniversary party, better dress was also called for, and so, with friend Jonas’s help, I located a tie dealer on the high street and purchased a beautiful striped purple tie and has similarly served me well.

For trousers I turned to my standby, a pair I purchased from Dow’s a few years ago; at the time spending that much for pants seemed crazy, but they were worth it, and they’re good for everything from walks on the beach to dinner with the Queen.

All of which is to say that if this week hand end credits, they would read:

Mr. Rukavina’s Hair by Zack Squires
Wardrobe furnished by Dow’s
Shirt by Target
Tie by John Henric
Sneakers by Rieker

Botany 500 it ain’t, but it did the job. And they never point the TV cameras at your feet.

The day I happened to be in Halifax this week happened to be the day that all Prince Edward Island schools were evacuated, so Catherine, bless her soul, bore the brunt of consequences-management.

While a school evacuation is stressful for everyone, it was a perfect storm of anxiety and stress for Oliver: he explained it to me last night on the phone as being stressful and then stressful stressful because he was sponging up everyone else’s stress too. He had the love and support of his teachers and EAs (and then Catherine, once she arrived on the scene) to help him through the worst of it, but it was a hard, hard day.

What gives me great comfort as his father, though, is that in the aftermath of all this he found ways of writing about what he was feeling. Like this:

and like this:

and like this:

I can be as cynical as the next person about the corrosive effects of Facebook and Twitter on our lives, but these social media have given Oliver a platform to express his feelings – often with eloquence that belies his age – in community. And for that I am grateful, and for that I am proud.

Oliver told me the other day that people need to remember that autism isn’t an illness, it’s a way that you are. One of the many gifts I receive from fatherhood is watching him figure out what that means.

When I last wrote, earlier today, I was between a television appearance and a radio appearance, parts of my visit to Halifax to talk about the 2017 Old Farmer’s Almanac.

The day has continued to be Almanac-filled: after those interviews, I spoke to a reporter at Cochrane Now on the phone about the upcoming Alberta winter, and then, just now, did a live hit on Regina’s  CJME News MainStreet program about Saskatchewan’s.

Here are the results of my day’s work.

Global News Halifax

I started the day on television; you can read more about it here. This is the resulting piece from the Global website:

News 95.7 – The Rick Howe Show

After starting the day on television, I had some time to cool my jets in the Halifax Central Library before heading across town to News 95.7 to appear on The Rick Howe Show.

Rick was great: curious, professional, funny; the kind of radio interviewer that every guest hopes for.

Here’s the audio of our chat from the station’s website:.

CJME MainStreet

This was a last-minute addition to my schedule, a late-afternoon phone call into this Regina afternoon talk show hosted by Jill Slater and Dave Arnold. Ironically, the segment opens with discussion of the Island-wide school evacuation back home that affected Oliver and his peers; but I was in Halifax, and there was winter weather to talk about, so it didn’t come up. I appreciated Dave and Jill’s enthusiasm for the Almanac, and for talking weather.

Here’s the station’s podcast of the segment:

It’s fun to talk about The Old Farmer’s Almanac, and I’m proud to be a small part of this years effort to announce the new edition to the world.

The fun continues tomorrow morning when I’ll appear on CTV Morning Live Atlantic after 7:00 a.m. Then it’s home to the Island to enjoy the weather itself after two days of talking about its predicting.

Back in June, when visiting with my colleagues at The Old Farmer’s Almanac, I naively said something like “if you ever need anyone in Canada to help with promotion of the 225th edition in the fall, just let me know.”

As it happens, they took me at my word, and so a few weeks ago I got my “media tour” schedule. As a result, here on this last day of summer, I am in Halifax, dressed in a shirt and tie, talking about the Almanac for the day.

My first appointment was with Andrea Dion, host of Global TV’s Halifax morning news. My call-time was 7:30 a.m. for a 7:50 a.m. interview, so I showed up, of course, at 7:00 a.m. Fortunately there’s a comfortable coffee place next door, so I was able to grab a coffee and review my solar science for half an hour.

At 7:30 a.m. I went next door, was shown into a comfortable lobby by an amiable security guard; a few minutes later Andrea came down to meet me, and walked me up into the spacious studio:

Remember that episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, “Venus Rising,” where Venus gets hired by WREQ, a automated radio station? Global TV in Halifax is eerily like that: other than Andrea, and the news reader, and the security guard, there didn’t seem to be anyone else present (although Andrea was speaking to someone in her earpiece, so there must have been someone, somewhere, controlling things). The cameras had no camera operators. There were no makeup people, or producers, or directors. In other words, picture in your mind an episode of HBO’s The Newsroom (or, for that matter, the CBC’s) and then remove all the secondary characters. Like that.

Fortunately Andrea was multi-talented, playing many roles at once: she got me set up with a wireless microphone (actually, with two microphones, as a fail safe), set a copy of the Almanac on a book stand, and did a short pre-interview with me.

At 7:50 a.m. we were live to Atlantic Canada and talking about long range weather.

It’s important to recall at this point – as I hastened to mentioned in the interview – that I work in the engine room of the The Old Farmer’s Almanac, and so the sorts of questions I’m used to answering are more “why isn’t the map rendering properly in Firefox on Samsung mobile devices in Kentucky?” and less “can you explain La Niña’s effects on this winter’s weather?” Of course I’ve studied, and have the benefit of 20 years of osmotic uptake of Almanac methodology in my pocket. But I also have an almost pathological inability to read and recall complicated things like “it’s going to be a colder, snowier winter in Atlantic Canada, with the cold coming in mid- to late-December, mid- to late-January and mid-February and the heaviest snow in mid- to late-December, through most of January and in mid- to late-February” (what you can’t see is me referring to my notes to be able to type that).

Fortunately, I think, I managed to do justice to the winter weather forecast, and did not end up committing any untruths to television. I was greatly aided in this regard by Andrea, my inquisitor, who is a skilled, knowledgeable interviewer.

After 5 minutes it was all over, the microphone returned to its bay, and farewells bade.

I’ve got a 2 hour break now before moving on to News 95.7 to appear on The Rick Howe Show at the noon hour where I am billed thusly:

An editor of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, Peter Rukavina joins us in studio to tell us about the new almanac and its winter forecast.

My appearance falls between “Physician Dr. John Gillis answers callers’ questions about health” and “Premier Stephen McNeil weighs in on the provincial worries about a nationally-imposed carbon tax.”

Wish me luck.

With apologies to John Muir, who wrote an excellent book of the same name, my mechanic Dave and I are engaged, it seems, in a wordless project to keep my 2000 Volkswagen Jetta alive.

We are aided in this effort by the relatively low mileage on the car – just over 105,000 kilometers in 17 years. And by Dave’s gung-ho attitude and our joint sense of wonder that the car is still on the road all these years later.

This month saw two episodes that threatened to derail this project.

First, a problem I started to notice a few weeks ago after driving back from supper in Victoria by the Sea. The car, especially when it was hot, and when I was driving slowly, was making sounds that sounded like an old iron bed squeaking, especially when I turned the wheel.

I dropped the car into Dave on Wednesday last and he found that solving this issue was as simple as replacing one of the ball joints. $142 later, no more bed-squeak and an almost-good-as-new car.

Second, a problem that’s come and gone a couple of times over the last month: activating the right-hand turn signal would cause the signal to flash at about two times the regular rate.

Reading various online sources suggested the problem could be the hazard switch on the console, which also serves as the relay for the turn signals.

I dropped by Brown’s VW on Monday to see if I could get a replacement, but they had none in stock and would have to order the part. For $32.

Before I placed the order, I decided to check at what we used to call Livingstone’s but now apparently call Island Auto Salvage, out by the airport.

They didn’t have anything immediately available, but suggested I check next door at the Brackley U-Pick.

I’d driven by the Brackley U-Pick sign a thousand times over the years and always assumed it was a strawberry operation.

It is not.

It’s a DIY auto salvage yard. You go out into the graveyard of automobiles, find your brand’s section, and scavenge for parts.

In other words, one of the greatest places you could imagine for a curious person.

And a place I was, memories of my Dad taking me similar places dancing in my head, proud to be able to take Oliver.

So we headed over, got the lay of the VW land from the guy behind the desk, and headed out to “halfway back on the left” where we found a selection of Volkswagen Jettas, Passats, Beetles and Golfs. Besides being ripe pickings for our needs, these cars, most of them bashed or banged or otherwise destroyed, served as a bracing reminder for the fragility of the automobile.

We found a couple of millennial Jettas with intact consoles and found that the hazard switch easily popped out of both.

Back at the office to pay, the chap suggested I might want to try them out first, which I thought a helpful gesture, and took him up on it.

Back at the Jetta I popped out our seemingly-defective switch and popped in one of those from the yard. Tried the turn signal. Still crazy-fast. Tried the other one from the yard. Still crazy-fast.

So it wasn’t the hazard switch relay.

Back to the yard. The web suggested the other reason might be a dead or dying turn signal bulb, so, after putting the relays back in place (so that others following could find them), we located a Jetta with a similar headlamp assembly and popped out the bulb.

Back at the office I was charged $1 for the bulb, and off we went home.

Back at home I found that accessing the bulb was trickier than it had been in the yard; YouTube came to the rescue, though, with this helpful video, and 5 minutes later I had the replacement bulb in place.

And that fixed the problem.

So, for $1 and an interesting amble through the car graveyard, we’re back in business.

2020 here we come!

I completed the principal printing for my contribution to the Sonnets 2016 project on the weekend. I reasoned that, given that the words are to be crammed up inside a library catalogue drawer together soon, they needed to air out in the sunlight, so I filled every last corner of the office floor with drying words.

Next step: sort everything into sonnet-wise order. Like Twister, but with Whence and Thou.

And endless are the modes of speech, and far
Extends from side to side the field of words.

– The Iliad of Homer: Translated Into English Blank Verse
William Cullen Bryant

I mentioned yesterday that I’d been able to find a detailed floor plan of Colonel Gray High School in the school inspection report that resulted from the 2010 identification of mould and moisture problems in Prince Edward Island schools.

The collection of inspection reports was originally posted online on the Department of Education’s website, but although the files remain online, the index that pointed to them has since gone dark.

To ensure that these reports continue to be available – both for their inspection reports and, most importantly for my purposes, for their helpful cache of school floor plans – I’ve mirrored them, with the help of the Internet Archive of the site, to a standalone archive of their own.

My habit regarding OpenStreetMap edits is to dive into improving the map for places that are new to me. After ignoring Colonel Gray Senior High School since we moved to Charlottetown 23 years ago, it’s now Oliver’s school, and so a big part of my life. So time for some edits.

Fortunately for the casual school-mapper, there are useful PDF building plans of every school – the result of the mould-moisture reports prepared in 2011 – and so I was able to use the floor plans in the PDF to make the rendering of the school in OpenStreetMap much more geographically accurate. I didn’t give it the full OSM indoor treatment, but the footprint of the building is now much better.

Here’s an animated visualization of the “before” and the “after”. Notice I even added the trees!

Oliver started grade 10 at Colonel Gray High School today, his first year of high school, and the first of his last three years in the public school system. As we have every day since kindergarten, we walked to school together; the new walk is about twice the length of the old walk, to Birchwood, which can only mean good things for my physical fitness. Figuring 4 km a school day for 3 years, that’s about 500 km of walking left to go until public school is done.

Grade Ten, 2016

Grade Nine, 2015

Grade Eight, 2014

Grade Seven, 2013

Grade Six, 2012

Grade Five, 2011

Grade One, 2007

I’m scheduled to make a presentation on open data to the Governance and Appeals Committee of the University of Prince Edward Island Board of Governors on Tuesday. The committee is interested in the same sort of “cook’s tour of open data” that I presented to many groups inside and outside of government over the last two years, and I was happy to oblige.

I’ve taken the opportunity to reconsider some of my earlier thinking, which has focused primarily on open data as a technical or logistical challenge — “PDFs are where data goes to die,” etc. – and to confront some of what might be called the “spiritual impediments” to open data: what is it about institutions that results in a less-than-full-throated embrace of open data, and is it worth pursuing an open data strategy until that can be considered and the reasons confronted?

Here’s the slide deck I’ll present from. And here’s a PDF of the same slides.